Pandã
Auroras - Project Room
São Paulo, Brazil
www.auroras.art.br/

Tapestry and ceramics
2019
© Ding Musa


The work with wool is part of the everyday life of Flávia Vieira (1983, Portugal). To build the weavings that she have been producing for the last years, the artist needs time, discipline and technical accuracy. Created point-to-point, artistically and manually, and often using natural pigments, these works often bring woven figures based on iconographies of the body paintings of Brazilian indigenous peoples, such as the Karajá and the Asurini.In “Pandã”, installation which occupies the Auroras’ Project Room, Flávia discusses the place of decoration in the field of visual arts by matching hierarchies between materials and mixing so-called “erudite” and popular references.
In the twentieth century, discussions about dissonances and points of contact between art and artifact were a subject of interest both in anthropology and the visual arts. A considerable part of the experiments of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century have been aimed at undoing these barriers and bringing the artistic work closer to everyday life. In this long trajectory, the body was always present and, long before the advent of performance as a field, it was fashion design that effectively managed to popularize the sphere of visual arts and bring it to a media context. One of the pioneers of these actions was Sonia Delaunay, whose radical experiments in the 1920s resulted in the indiscriminate use of geometric patterns in dresses, sets and in her paintings, forming a kind of “total stamping.”In this project, Vieira draws on part of the artist’s work by replicating the same image in the two weavings and ceramics placed in front of them, creating a pandã relationship. Not by chance, everything takes its place: if the process of development of these weavings results in unique and fetishisable objects, the ceramics that Flávia creates are born from an easily replicable mold and from a much simpler process. Arranged in space, the pieces become part of a single organism, where the play between vision and illusion and the displacement of meaning caused by the transposition of these elements into a decorative bias are more important than the artistic value that each piece may have individually.Process, materials and result are imbedded in this work, and though they may not be wholly self-evident to the viewer, they are as entangled as the points of the plots forming these tissues.
 

Thierry Freitas